This IBM® Redbooks® publication provides information about the InfiniBand standard and how the standard has been implemented to support IBM High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters.

This book will help you understand, plan, implement, and manage InfiniBand using IBM servers and switches to form a high-bandwidth, low-latency communication network for applications.

This book presents the software and hardware components that must be brought together to form the management and application foundation. We cover cluster management, node installation, monitoring the infrastructure, and application support, such as IBM TWS LoadLeveler®, Parallel Environment, and various other AIX® and SUSE SLES tools.

This book is intended for IT architects, system designers, data center planners, and system administrators who must design, configure, and manage an InfiniBand infrastructure in an HPC cluster.

Part 1. Understanding InfiniBand

Chapter 1. InfiniBand architecture

Chapter 2. High performance computing hardware components using IB

Chapter 3. Technical description of software components

Part 2. Planning for InfiniBand

Chapter 4. Planning for an HPC cluster

Part 3. Implementing InfiniBand

Chapter 5. Implementation overview

Chapter 6. Configuring the InfiniBand fabric

Chapter 7. Configuring InfiniBand on AIX

Chapter 8. Configuring InfiniBand on Linux on Power

Part 4. Managing the InfiniBand environment

Chapter 9. Fabric management and monitoring

Chapter 10. Node management and monitoring

Appendix A. Advanced syslog-ng configuration

Appendix B. Fabric port counters

Appendix C. Fabric Management scripts

Appendix D. AIX ibstat -s output description

Appendix E. Recommended MPI environment settings